Mental Health Service Systems require dependable clinical, service effort and cost data for: (a) Ongoing management of clinical service and quality assurance; (b) program planning, budgeting and administration and (c) policy development and decisions. That is, people at all levels of the service delivery system, from clinical staff to legislators, rely upon dependable clinical cost outcome data for their decision making. Ideally, the clinical data should reflect the status of clients prior to, during and following the delivery of mental health services. The proposed program of research intends to develop methods which can accomplish three objectives useful to the management of MH service programs: First, whether and how a variety of client, clinician and situational facets influence clinical data dependability; second, whether and how feedback to those persons collecting and/or using clinical data on how their behaviors influenced the data dependability in the past will in turn influence their future collection and/or use behaviors; third, whether and how cost outcome data is used as a basis for decision making at the various levels of the MH service system. The most important potential product of the proposed research could be that of designing, testing and developing methods to address these three objectives for possible use in MH system management at both the local program and higher levels of the system.